BARCODE: high throughput screening and analysis of soft active materials

Active, responsive, non-equilibrium materials–at the forefront of
materials engineering–offer dynamical restructuring, mobility, and other
complex life-like properties. Yet, this enhanced functionality comes with
significant amplification of the size and complexity of the datasets
needed to characterize their properties, thereby challenging conventional
approaches to analysis. To meet this need, we developed BARCODE:
Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design, and
Engineer, an open-access software that automates high-throughput screening
of microscopy video data to enable non-equilibrium material optimization
and discovery. BARCODE produces a unique fingerprint or ‘barcode’ of
performance metrics that visually and quantitatively encodes dynamic
material properties with minimal file size. Using three complementary
material-agnostic analysis branches, BARCODE significantly reduces data
dimensionality and size, while providing rich, multiparametric outputs and
rapid, tractable characterization of activity and structure. Here, we
provide a series of datasets of cytoskeleton networks and cell monolayers
that demonstrate BARCODE’s abilities to accelerate and streamline
screening and analysis, reveal unexpected correlations and emergence,
while showcasing BARCODE's ability to enable broad non-expert data
access, comparison, and sharing. BARCODE software is available
at https://github.com/softmatterdb/barcode.